Back In Time: The Birth Of YouTube

Back in Time is ED’s newspaper-like column that reports an incident from the past as though it has happened just yesterday. It allows the reader to re-live it several years later, on the date it had occurred.

For this incident, we go back in time to 2005.

February 15, 2005

Former employees of PayPal, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim have developed a video sharing website called YouTube. According to a story, they got the initial idea when Hurley and Chan were unable to share videos of a party they attended, in the absence of such a website. Another story says that they were unable to find videos of Janet Jackson in SuperBowl 2004 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which led to them working on the idea. The company has registered itself under the URL youtube.com.

April 23, 2005

The founders at YouTube have uploaded their first video on the website titled ‘Me at the Zoo’ which features co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego zoo.

October 9, 2006

Upcoming technological website, YouTube, has just been purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion in stock. It is Google’s second largest acquisition till date, and reportedly came after YouTube presented three agreements with media companies in an attempt to escape copyright-infringement issues.

January 2, 2007

The Person of the Year 2006 is…You.

TIME Magazine has declared a large YouTube screen with a mirror as its Person of the Year.

This award has recognized the millions of people who have anonymously contributed content to YouTube, Wikipedia, and the other websites that feature such content.

June 19, 2007

YouTube has announced its new localization system. Under this system, it will be creating localized videos for countries like France, the UK, Australia and Belgium. This system has been introduced in an effort to compete with local video sharing websites, and YouTube has also entered into an agreement with local video stations to legally broadcast content.

May 18, 2010

YouTube has replaced its star-rating system with a new thumbs-rating system, as the previous star-rating system was only relevant with 1 and 5 star ratings, said a company insider. Many people have expressed discontent over this move, but whether it will be effective is yet to be seen.

October 7, 2011

Google-owned online video sharing company, YouTube, has just launched its first-ever film rental service in the UK, with thousands of blockbusters like The Dark Knight Rises and Reservoir Dogs, putting it in direct competition with Amazon’s LoveFilm.

October 21, 2015

YouTube has come up with a paid subscription service for its users in the United States called YouTube Red, which promises to provide “advertising-free streaming of videos hosted by the service, offline and background playback of videos on mobile devices, access to new original content, and access to advertising-free music streaming”. This has come up as a surprise to its users after mixed reception of its service MusicKey in 2014 in collaboration with Google Play Music.

YouTube: The New TV?

Daily YouTubers have grown bigger, and they are trying to produce high-quality content for viewers. There have been many instances where companies have been broken down and revived (The famous Domino’s case) because of a few videos, and this will continue to happen as users have control of the content. Advertisements, speeches, tutorials, and even television series are just a click away.

It has become a large part of many people’s life, and it is only going to get bigger and better.

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